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Saturday, May 25, 2013

Mutual Guruship

My dear friends, God was alone and he said, "This is no fun." And so he split himself into two and became "as a man locked in embrace with a woman." Thus it is said, Radha and Krishna are one soul in two bodies. All romantic love is an attempt to recreate this original simultaneous oneness and difference. In one dimension we recreate, in another we serve, that ideal. The transformation of the world through love passes through this gate. We worship Radha and Krishna and no other. We pray for the Love that inundates them to guide our intelligence.

Proper loving relations have to be based on liberty and equality. This means that the patriarchal attitude is automatically excluded. Where power relations are dominated by the male and the woman is seen as subservient, i.e., where the guru-chela spiritual dynamic is essentially a one-way street, the relationship may reach a certain level of love, but never the fullness of madhurya.

Parakiya bhava means that a woman takes the freedom and independence to choose, and the man recognizes that he must be more than just a vishaya. In svakiya, the woman puts herself in the position of dependence. The time has passed for these things. Men need to cast aside the false and purely external assurances of patriarchy, which ultimately only support false ego and false power and subvert the emotional completion that comes from genuine spiritually profound love. Learn the art of love through the system of mutual guruship. Learn the system of mutual guruship from a Yugal guru.

Some may wonder what I mean by mutual guruship. I came across this quote just now which connects with my concept rather nicely: "A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's natures, behind their facades, and who connect on a deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension—seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence." John Welwood, Love and Awakening: Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationship.

This resonates nicely with M. Scott Peck's definition of love from A Road Less Traveled, as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."

This very definition indicates that one must be a sadhaka in order to cultivate love. To get true love, we must be prepared. The soil must be tilled and fertile for the germ of love to grow. We can only go so far alone. Ultimately we need to look at ourselves in the mirror of the intimate guru, the guru partner, who will know and care about us in ways that require surrender our distant pedestal-sitting gurus never can.

Choose your partners wisely, from a position of self-awareness, self-confidence and self-realization. Only then will the kind of recognition Welwood speaks of be possible.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

So prabhu...do you think that all souls have one person, as k has one, that is their "other half"? Or can many different people fulfill that desire to love and be loved? Or is that desire an illusion and jivas cannot have that feeling with someone lastingly, the only true satisfying relationship being with krsna? Are m-f relationships on vaikuntha eternal? Do souls like Lalita have a male to love in that way? -- Maybe in an expansion form who lives on a vaikuntha planet, not k's.

If krsna only has that relationship with R, we could not have that with Him. So if we are desiring that love with someone, is that some selfish desire to get rid of?